A few months back Anthony wrote about Sweden’s efforts in establishing a presence in Second Life. At the time those responsible for the project, and those associated with it such as former PM Carl Blidt, noted that it represented a broader effort to enshrine the country’s reputation as an innovative and forward thinking locale. Their efforts, and similar ones such as those by the governments of Estonia and the Maldives, have focused on jumping on this new medium for communication and information dispersal. So whether you’re a possible investor looking for information about the taxation of expats, or a tourist looking for visa info, these new outposts become an additional source.

Other government agencies have taken a more engaging approach to this virtual world. For example, the US National Institute of Health created Health Info Island, a three-pronged approach to using Second Life as a new platform to train, teach and inform a new community of interested participants. Moreover, the Tuscan Tourist Foundation has created a space that allows visitors to tour heritage sites such as the Tower of Pisa and the Ponte Vecchio, and simultaneously channel people in an e-commerce site that allows visitors to buy real world souvenirs and specialities.

These three examples highlight three different uses of Second Life for governments – all related to service delivery to existing or potential citizens or visitors. But are these three types of Second Life engagement revolutionary? Or are they just new mediums for the same information?

More important, though, is to ask what is Second Life’s ultimate potential for use by governments or government agencies? Evidently, it’s important to remember that for all the hype around Second Life, and it’s now 11 million members, there’s perhaps less than half a million active users. And to break it down a little further, the top source of those active residents (August 2007 stats) is the US at 30%, and then it falls to Brazil, Japan, Germany and the UK all at approximately 7% .

Now those stats equate to the following: in the US, 150,000 users for a population of 301 million, or .05% of the total population. For the other top five countries the stats are in a similar ballpark – between .02 and .06 of the total population. And that doesn’t even begin to entertain the thought of duplicate accounts. A sceptic might thus question the value of investing much to reach such small numbers.

So if you’re a government agency with only so much bandwidth, and only so many resources, to begin a Web 2.0 initiative with, is Second Life going to be a priority?

Let’s compare those numbers to Facebook. Of its population of 60 million members, approximately 22 million come from the US, and 7 million from Canada and the UK. Now evidently there’s a similar issue of duplicate accounts and active vs. inactive registrants but at face value the numbers are dramatically more significant: Facebook’s US population equates to 7% of the total US population; UK users make up 11% of the total population; and finally Canadian participants comprise a whopping 22% of the total population. Using the Web 2.0 to target specific populations with services or information thus seems to heavily favour Facebook.

But this isn’t to say that Second Life doesn’t have its uses.  The key is thus to take Second Life for what it still is, a relatively unique niche space, whose utility for engagement should be targeted on its ability to pinpoint a population of Web 2.0 saavy users, and most important, in a visual and quasi-physical manner.